COLUMN: One a Penny, Two Another Penny

By Tobin Barnes 

The penny bandits, among other woes, drove my old man nuts.
    

Soft drinks, back when I was a kid, sold for ten cents a bottle. (I know, that officially dates me as a codger.)
    

Oh, and here’s another stunner from the past: people drank only twelve ounces at a time.
    

Yeah. Weird, huh? It’s shocking that people could be completely satisfied without having to buy the stuff by the liter or the big gulp or the half gallon barrel, for crying out loud. (Man, are we on the downhill slide or what?)
    

Anyway, getting back to the dime pop machine we had at our motel, my old man had given me the profits for all the things I did around the place. Even then, I was making maybe a nickel an hour, but, hey, I got room and board, too.
    

Well, it so happened one day, while I was collecting the take from the tin box in the machine, I discovered these filed- down pennies scattered amongst the nickels, dimes, and quarters. The machine had evidently accepted these maimed pennies as dimes and coughed up bottles of pop in exchange.
    

The pennies continued to appear in the ensuing days.
    

Image via WikipediaSomeone, evil in intent but admittedly industrious on a certain level, was making a nine-cent profit on each penny he or she was “investing” and leaving me with a loss of whatever I was paying Cappy, the pop route man, for each bottle.
    

Now imagine tediously filing the edges off one penny after another to get free bottles of Coke and Seven-Up. No doubt, crime was paying, but one would think an honest use of a person’s time would be more interesting, less mind-numbing and more profitable, although there might be a certain craftsman’s pride in this kind of work.
    

Technically, my old man was left monetarily unscathed by this penny-ante crime spree. I was the one taking the hit.
    

But it came down to principle with him. See, someone was stealing money that could have been his if he hadn’t chosen to give it to his kid. So this was serious business.
    

So the cop was on the beat, but I had to do all the work.
    

From there on it went like this: step one--I had to empty out the coin box several times a day to maintain a clean evidence trail; step two--I had to keep an eye on the pop machine to identify likely suspects.
    

Whenever I was watching TV in the living room, I also had to be looking out the window intermittently to see if anyone was using the pop machine. (Yeah, another crappy job at the motel. How many is that now?) Then whenever someone used the machine, I’d go out and see what kind of coins were in the box.
    

This went on for a couple days until we got a break in the case.
    

One day, a car, containing a girl and a woman, parked horizontally to the pop machine. I was at my post, watching. The woman got out--she was pregnant, which is neither here nor there--went to the machine and started putting coins in and taking bottles out, giving the bottles to the girl in the car.
    

Well, obviously, this was it.
    

I told my old man, sitting there on the couch, and he was out the door in a flash--almost as fast as when he went after the pop bottle bandit. (He was never queasy with confrontation issues.) In minutes he had broken the case wide open and called the cops down for the clean-up.
    

Case solved.
    

It turned out that the woman and the girl were part of a small but insidiously cross-bred network that had its tentacles around most of the pop machines in town.
    

Phew!
    

Vendors, such as I, could now rest easily again knowing that pop machine profits were safe once more.